power

Massive power outage in Spain, Portugal leaves millions in dark

outage, Policy, Portugal, power, power outage, spain / Shannon Garcia / April 28, 2025

National grid operators in Spain and Portugal confirm that a massive electrical blackout has hit the Iberian Peninsula today, starting just a couple of minutes after 12: 30 pm Central European Summer Time (10: 30 am UTC, or about 6: 30 am US Eastern Daylight Time). The outage appears to have resulted in near-total loss of electricity in Spain, Portugal, the Principality of Andorra, and at least some portions of southwest France.

The impacts are widespread and pervasive; in major cities like Madrid, trains are not running, airports are unable to operate, and businesses and schools have closed. Citizens are still able to use cellular networks to communicate so far (most cell towers and network operations centers have battery or generator backup systems).

Image of a line graph showing electricity demand dropping to almost nothing. — Electrical demand curve from Red Eléctrica site showing the outage. Credit: Red Eléctrica

Bloomberg energy reporter Akshat Rathi posted on Bluesky that Spanish grid operator Red Electrica claims the outage is due to “grid oscillation,” a phenomenon that occurs when the system is unable to suppress oscillations that normally happen as sources and load enter and leave the system. Rathi quotes Bloomberg cybersecurity reporter Ryan Gallagher, noting that a cyber attack has been ruled out, and the fault is likely technical:

Initial investigations into the cause of the outages suggest a technical fault rather than a cyberattack, according to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). “For the moment the investigation seems to point to a technical/cable issue,” said a spokesperson for the agency in an emailed statement. “Nevertheless, ENISA is closely monitoring the situation and we are in contact with the relevant authorities at national and EU level.”

Ars spoke directly to a reader named Tiago Carvalho, currently in Lisbon, Portugal. According to Carvalho, banks and supermarkets in Lisbon have been closed for hours, with a small number of shops and restaurants remaining open and accepting only cash. Tourists in Lisboa are still walking around enjoying the sunny weather, but locals are doing what they can to stock up, anticipating three or more days without power. Carvalho says only his 5G data connection is functional; when reached via Discord, he described the conditions like this:

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Generating power with a thin, flexible thermoelectric film

The No. 1 nuisance with smartphones and smartwatches is that we need to charge them every day. As warm-blooded creatures, however, we generate heat all the time, and that heat can be converted into electricity for some of the electronic gadgetry we carry.

Flexible thermoelectric devices, or F-TEDs, can convert thermal energy into electric power. The problem is that F-TEDs weren’t actually flexible enough to comfortably wear or efficient enough to power even a smartwatch. They were also very expensive to make.

But now, a team of Australian researchers thinks they finally achieved a breakthrough that might take F-TEDs off the ground.

“The power generated by the flexible thermoelectric film we have created would not be enough to charge a smartphone but should be enough to keep a smartwatch going,” said Zhi-Gang Chen, a professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Does that mean we have reached a point where it would be possible to make a thermoelectric Apple Watch band that could keep the watch charged all the time? “It would take some industrial engineering and optimization, but we can definitely achieve a smartwatch band like that,” Chen said.

Manufacturing heaven

Thermoelectric generators producing enough power to run something like an Apple Watch were, so far, made with rigid bulk materials. The obvious problem with them was that nobody would want to wear a metal slab on their wrist or run a power cable from anywhere else to their watch. Flexible thermoelectric devices, on the other hand, were perfectly wearable but offered efficiencies that made them good for low-power health-monitoring electronics rather than more power-hungry hardware like smartwatches.

Back in 2021, generating 35 microwatts per square centimeter in a wristband worn during a typical walk outside was impressive enough to land your research paper in Nature. Today, Chen and his colleagues made a flexible thermoelectric device that performed over 34 times better at room temperature. “To the best of our knowledge, we hold a current record in this field,” Chen says.